Shofar FTP Archive File: people/s/speer.albert/shunning-knowledge

Speer, Albert. _Inside the Third Reich_. Macmillan, New York, 1970.
pp. 18-19.
Quite often even the most important step in a man's life, his
choice of vocation, is taken quite frivolously. He does not
bother to find out enough about the basis and the various aspects
of that vocation. Once he has chosen it, he is inclined to switch
off his critical awareness and to fit himself wholly into the
predetermined career.
My decision to enter Hitler's party was no less frivolous. Why,
for example, was I willing to abide by the almost hypnotic
impression Hitler's speech had made upon me? Why did I not
undertake a thorough, systematic investigation of, say, the value
or worthlessness of the ideologies of _all_ the parties? Why did
I not read the various party programs, or at least Hitler's _Mein
Kampf_ and Rosenberg's _Myth of the Twentieth Century_? As an
intellectual I might have been expected to collect documentation
with the same thoroughness and to examine various points of view
with the same lack of bias that I had learned to apply to my
preliminary architectual studies. This failure was rooted in my
inadequate political schooling. As a result, I remained
uncritical, unable to deal with the arguments of my student
friends, who were predominantly indoctrinated with the National
Socialist ideology.
For had I only wanted to, I could have found out even then that
Hitler was proclaiming expansion of the Reich to the east; that
he was a rank anti-Semite; that he was committed to a system of
authoritarian rule; that after attaining power he intended to
eliminate democratic procedures and would thereafter yield only to
force. Not to have worked that out for myself; not, given my
education, to have read books, magazines, and newspapers of
various viewpoints; not to have tried to see through the whole
apparatus of mystification -- was already criminal. At this
initial stage my guilt was as grave as, at the end, my work for
Hitler. For being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning
knowledge creates direct responsibility for the consequences --
from the very beginning.

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